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Her sentence is her own land without happiness: a realm in despair, where every budding blossom of hope—the light offered by beauty—is drained from the landscape by the iron-clawed hand of the Queen.
She emerges in a dead forest of fog and bare trees, near black, and almost chokes on the spores that cloud from the ground when she stumbles on a patch of fungi. She tries to be careful, but she can scarcely see her feet, never mind the ground on which they tread. The trees come alive from the roots to the tips; their branches move as snakes, silently reaching for her limbs and coiling around her wrists. She lets them take her. Perhaps if they take her life it will be a kindness.
The Dark Curse is already laughable.
The branches are just reaching her neck by the time guards in dark armour find her and cut her loose. They are not unlike the ones she had once commanded, but now she gets to feel what it is to be at the other end of their orders. She is grabbed roughly and hauled away by one guard either side of her, with their arms linked at her shoulders, the metal plates of their armour digging into her sides. Her feet drag; brambles slice at her calves.
“You should know better than to venture into the Dark Forest,” one of them growls. His tone is without sympathy; it mocks her.
When they reach the gates of the Queen’s fortress they drop her, and she hits the flagstones shoulder first. It shoots with pain, but she has known worse.
“Get up,” they order, and she already knows better than to defy them.
The gate rises, the sound of its gears groaning with its weight. She is pushed forwards, stumbles into the fortress, but maintains her balance.
“Walk,” they say, and she does, even as her joints ache and protest with every step.
She is guided to a tower, where she ascends a stone stairway that seems to spiral upwards endlessly, followed by the guards who grumble about the sluggishness of her pace. Somehow, the top is reached, and the final steps open out into a grand hall, lit by candles, their flames reflected off golden ornaments.
The Queen sits in her throne and her finery at the centre of the farthest wall. She is beautiful, regal, but the lines of age that had served to make Regina’s mother more severe only seem to weaken her. When she notices Regina studying her, a hand moves cautiously to her face, as if about to shield it, then stops.
Regina is prompted to venture further in, where the back of her leg is kicked, and she is forced to kneel.
“She is too old,” says the Queen, and she carries whole worlds in the way she draws out the words.
“Your Majesty, there is no longer much choice.”
The Queen closes her eyes and inhales deeply. Regina knows that response; she has lived it a thousand times: the peaking of disappointment and rage, and the waiting for it to dull. It never leaves entirely, but it will lessen.
“What news of Snow White?”
When Regina gasps she is ignored.
“None as yet, my Queen.”
Her eyes fly open. “Leave us,” she commands, and the guards follow her orders without hesitation.
She turns the weight of her gaze back to Regina, studies her for a moment, her eyes tracing over her figure.
“Well, at least you are beautiful,” she says, and such a compliment, Regina is certain, has never sounded more damning. “Rise,” she demands.
Regina pushes herself up onto her feet. Some of her pride returns to her, it seems, in that moment, and she straightens her spine, tries to make herself as tall as her body will allow. She was a Queen once, too, after all. But when the Queen rises from her throne and drifts across the room she still towers above her. Regina does not move in the slightest as the Queen reaches out and puts a hand to her throat, the metal that adorns her fingertips cold against her skin, but in her guts she can feel herself submitting.
“I will have it,” says the Queen, and her mouth opens wide, wide enough that Regina is certain her jaw must be unhinging, and as she inhales Regina can feel all the air in the room swirl around them. Something shifts beneath her skin, as if her very life is being drawn to the surface.
But then the Queen falters, a trace of fear flashes across her fraying beauty. She releases her grasp on Regina’s throat, and Regina can’t help but gasp and curl inwards on herself as the prickling beneath her skin retreats.
“You are not of this world,” the Queen accuses.
“No,” Regina croaks.
“You are much older than you appear.” This time she sounds impressed.
She puts a hand to Regina’s chest, the base of her palm resting just above her breast.
“Where is your heart?”
“Worlds away. It was taken from me.”
The Queen seems to ponder that for a moment, and she blinks heavily as tears well up in her eyes.
“They have called me heartless,” she says, and digs the points of her claws into the flesh where her hand lies. Regina gasps as her skin is punctured, beads of blood forming and trailing a line down towards the valley between her breasts, blotching in the already soiled fabric of her dress.
“And yet you bleed.”
“Even the worst of us do.”
The Queen smiles lightly, lifts the talons she wears on her other hand to her own chest, and swipes them across the skin that is bared there. It breaks, but no blood rushes to the surface, and only seconds later the gashes close, leaving the skin smooth, as unblemished as it was before.
“Not I,” she says and leans towards Regina again, so close that all Regina can see are the tiny movements of her eyes as they stare deep into her own. “You must tell me everything.”
*
Regina does. Tell her everything, that is. It surprises her, how words that for so many years had gone unspoken spill so freely from her now. Words that she could not even utter to defend herself when the council, led by Emma reluctantly taking her title as saviour, had looked upon her and given her the chance to speak.
Queen Ravenna—that is what she says her name is—listens attentively. Her eyes widen at the mention of Snow White’s name.
“Is there one in every world, do you think?” she asks.
Regina tells her of the world she’s known where their story is but legend, countless versions told and retold. Perhaps all of them, in some dimension, are true. She does not speak of how the fair Snow White triumphs in all accounts.
Ravenna’s nostrils flare at any mention of the precious Snow, but her most vitriolic reactions are reserved for the stories of Daniel, of Leopold, of her father in his weakest moments.
“Love,” she says, “is little more than a word banded about by men with concealed intentions. They will all betray you in the end.”
“Not Daniel—” Regina tries to protest, but Ravenna stops her mouth by placing two fingers on her lips.
“He simply did not live to.”
Ravenna takes her fingers away and replaces them with her mouth. She tastes of wine and ashes.
She pulls away and says, “I have loved a hundred men like him,” she says. “And I have lived to destroy them all as they would have me.”
*
Regina watches as Ravenna takes the youth of dozens. Their weak and dying bodies cover the floors of the castle, writhing and shrivelled and groaning, little more left of them than bones and sagging skin. Their hollow faces peer at Regina pleadingly, as if there is anything she can do. But she does not pity them. She comes to hate them.
Ravenna rolls her head backwards, basking in her revitalised pulchritude.
Word comes that Snow White—the one of this world—is raising an army, and that is when Ravenna comes for her.
“For once I am sorry,” she admits. “But you, at least, I think will understand. Your story is ended and from your weakness will come my strength.”
Regina knows better than to struggle, but then they all did and struggled anyway. Her body responds of its own accord, her arms lashing out. Ravenna is too strong, and as a whirlwind erupts around them, Regina feels it seeping from her every pore, feels every stolen year that she had lived in a land where time did not move begin to weigh upon her. She feels her age, and then so, so much more.
She falls to the floor, and waits for death to claim her.
Above her, Ravenna is resplendent. She wonders how long it will be before Snow White strips it from her.
*
She awakens alongside countless others. Above her is a girl with dark hair and pale skin, adorned in the shining armour of a knight. She holds out a hand. Regina grasps it, and she is pulled to her feet. The girl is strong. Her beauty seems accidental, unrehearsed. It has echoes of a child Regina once knew.
“You’re Snow White,” Regina says. “You won.”
The girl nods. “The kingdom is safe now,” she says. “Welcome back.”
Regina watches her as she moves on to help the next person clamber to their feet and discover the youth that has been returned to them. Her ease with them all is natural, and each one of them fawns.
A familiar anger itches beneath Regina’s skin. She yearns for a world where Snow White does not win.